caitlinjohnstone | In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch
from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were
Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi.
One of them was not human.
On
the walk the four discussed science, because science is what they
always discussed. It's what they lived, it's what they thought about,
it's what they ate, slept and breathed. On this particular occasion they
discussed the recent spate of reports about flying saucers, and whether
or not an alien civilization could hypothetically have discovered how
to travel faster than the speed of light.
Once they arrived at the
Fuller Lodge for their meal their intense conversation was interrupted
by the mundane activities of finding seats and ordering their food.
After a brief pause, Fermi's thick Italian accent broke the silence with
a question that would later become famous.
"But where is everybody?" he asked loudly.
The
way he phrased it caused the other three to burst out laughing; they
immediately understood that he was asking, in his own inimitable way,
why no signs of extraterrestrial life had been discovered.
They
listened with rapt attention as Fermi's luminous mind rapidly dissected
the sheer mathematical improbability of humanity being the only
intelligent life in this galaxy, let alone the entire universe, given
the sheer number of stars and the likelihood that at least a small
percentage of them would have habitable planets capable of giving rise
to life. This question, and the peculiar exclamation with which it was
first expressed, would go on to be known as the Fermi paradox.
The
scientists joyfully batted around ideas with the Italian "pope of
physics", then finished their meal, returned to the laboratory, and they
each went their separate ways.
Fermi worked late, as such rare
geniuses often do. Out there in the world with small talk, politics,
family and teenaged children, it was difficult to really feel at ease.
But in the world of scientific adventure, discoveries and breakthroughs,
he always felt in command.
The sunlight had long gone and the lab
had gone still, and Fermi was scribbling away in his office, when there
was a knock at the door. It gave Fermi a start; nobody ever interrupted
him at this hour, that's what he liked about it.
"What is it?" he asked in irritation.
The door opened. It was York.
"Hi," York said.
"York," Fermi replied.
"Can I come in?"
"Yes, yes come in."
York closed the door.
"So," he said. "Do you want to know?"
"Want to know what?"
"Do you want an answer to the question you asked at lunch?"
NYPost | A white New York City psychoanalyst is under fire after publishing a
report decrying his skin color as a “malignant, parasitic like
condition” without a “permanent cure.”
Dr. Donald Moss — a published author who teaches at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute — published “On Having Whiteness” last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
“Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has —
a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a
particular susceptibility,” an abstract of the article on Sage Journals
says.
“The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world.
“Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse,” states the paper, also published on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed site.
The “deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples,” the
abstract says — and “once established, these appetites are nearly
impossible to eliminate.”
While “effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and
social-historical interventions,” there is “no guarantee against
regression.”
“There is not yet a permanent cure,” the abstract says.
theatlantic |All four of the
narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and
enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all
respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and
lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of
the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and
welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense
of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others
want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as
polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one
another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against
tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever
more extreme version of itself.
All
four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that
generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and
losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are
the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a
smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the
credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who
want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the
hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are
treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the
country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and
the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.
I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.
It’s
common these days to hear people talk about sick America, dying
America, the end of America. The same kinds of things were said in 1861,
in 1893, in 1933, and in 1968. The sickness, the death, is always a
moral condition. Maybe this comes from our Puritan heritage. If we are
dying, it can’t be from natural causes. It must be a prolonged act of
suicide, which is a form of murder.
I
don’t think we are dying. We have no choice but to live together—we’re
quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what
kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science
experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some
destructive, that can’t be wished away. Our passion for equality, the
individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty,
the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and
intellect—these won’t disappear. A way forward that tries to evade or
crush them on the road to some free, smart, real, or just utopia will
never arrive and instead will run into a strong reaction. But a way
forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights
and opportunities—the only basis for shared citizenship and
self-government—is a road that connects our past and our future.
Meanwhile,
we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two
narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other.
Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within
each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages
on.
amgreatness |Despite her previous acclaim, Nikole
Hannah-Jones didn’t really come to the attention of many Americans
before August 2019, when the New York Times published “The 1619 Project.” This special issue of the New York Times Magazine
was devoted to the thesis that America was founded on black oppression
and white supremacy. It put Hannah-Jones’ particular genius on display.
She edited the collection of articles and wrote the lead essay, under
the expansive title, “Our democracy’s founding ideals of liberty and
equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to
make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy
at all.” I think it fair to say that as editor she gave the project its
particular tone: stylish, in-control, aggressive, laced with a thread of
self-pity and a larger weave of self-aggrandizement, thin-skinned, and
in a peculiar way, heedless.
She was determined to say what she wanted to say, regardless of the
facts, but she was also determined to assert that her story was accurate
to the bone.
That was a contradiction, and it was a
time bomb. Sooner or later people were going to notice that among those
many confident assertions, some were iffy, others very doubtful, and
some completely false.
Beyond the three-sentence title of
her lead essay, Hannah-Jones took other liberties. Perhaps most
famously, she wrote, “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided
to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to
protect the institution of slavery.” This is not true. Indeed it isn’t
even a little bit true, and the leading historians of colonial America
from around the world quickly pointed this out. They did so politely by
writing to the newspaper’s editors; they did so individually, and as
joint signers of letters; they published their dissents. But receiving
either no answer or only firm rebuffs, they collectively stood back. Not
only was the Times
determined to keep its fabrication intact, but the great majority of
American historians either turned stone silent or capitulated.
Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, wrote a widely read post in January 2020, “1619 and All That,”
in which he dismissed all the historical criticism of “The 1619
Project” as “a public scuffle between journalists and members of our
profession.” The “1619 Project,” he said, is an interpretive framework
“that many historians probably already accept—namely, that slavery and
racism lie at the root of nearly everything that has truly made America
exceptional.” Lichtenstein gave a permission slip to historians who
didn’t want to be bothered with the inconvenience of maintaining
historical accuracy on the matters at hand.
Why would people who devoted their
professional lives to the truth-telling of history go mum when presented
with one of the most publicized historical falsehoods in decades? Why
especially as that falsehood was being adapted rapidly to school
curricula across the country? Plainly this is a matter of racial
politics having invaded the history profession. For some, that is a
positive development: promoting greater attention to slavery and the
oppression of blacks is such a worthy goal that historians should
gracefully overlook whatever journalistic lapses may have marred the
great work of popularizing the cause. For others, the racialist agenda
is something to be feared. To criticize “The 1619 Project” or Nikole
Hannah-Jones was and still is to court professional friction or perhaps
even ostracism.
But that may be changing. The glare of attention is making it harder for people to avoid the shoddiness of the work.
Dissenters
Originally, it fell mostly to outsiders to draw attention to what the Times had perpetrated. The World Socialist Websitewas
among the publications to take the lead. This Marxist organization had
the foresight to invite a collection of prominent historians to be
interviewed about “The 1619 Project,” and to publish these in easily
accessible form. Thus, we heard early on from James McPherson, James
Oakes, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, Richard Carwardine, and Clayborne
Carson, among others. The editors of World Socialist Website, David
North and Thomas Mackaman, and some of their associates added their own
analyses, which, despite being freighted with their Marxist views, were
impressively steadfast in separating fact from fiction. North and
Mackaman eventually gathered their interviews and analyses into a book, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History.
At bottom, North and Mackaman oppose
the idea that the basic conflict in American history is to be found in
racial antagonism. They stick to the Marxist thesis that it is really
about class. At least this gives them a place to stand outside the
racial hysteria of our moment in history, and from that position they
soberly take in the parade of historical absurdities that Hannah-Jones
and her peers at the Times have served up and that the journalistic and educational establishments continue to celebrate.
dailymail | Hunter Biden addressed his white lawyer as 'n***a' multiple times,
used phrases like 'true dat n***a' and bantered 'I only love you because
you're black,' in shocking texts unearthed days after Joe's emotional
Tulsa speech decrying racism
Text messages obtained by DailyMail.com reveal Hunter Biden used the n-word multiple times in banter with his lawyer
The
president's son, 51, flippantly addressed corporate attorney George
Mesires, who is white, by the racial slur, with phrases including 'true
dat n***a'
In a December 2018
conversation, Hunter asked Mesires: 'How much money do I owe you.
Becaause (sic) n***a you better not be charging me Hennessy rates.'
In another chat a month later, Hunter cracked jokes about his penis and then told Mesires 'I only love you because you're black'
'It's so annoying when you interject with frivolity,' the Chicago lawyer replied
The
damning texts have emerged just days after his father, President Joe
Biden gave a speech decrying racism on the 100th anniversary of the
Tulsa massacre
Biden has sought to portray racial justice as a top priority for his administration
Hunter also saved a meme with a photo of his father hugging Barack Obama with a caption describing a joke conversation
'Obama: Gonna miss you, man Joe: Can I say it? Just this once? Obama: *sigh* go ahead Joe: You my n***a, Barack'
Hunter Biden used the n-word multiple times in conversation with his white, $845-per-hour lawyer, his texts messages reveal.
The shocking texts may prove embarrassing for his father President Joe Biden,
who just last week gave a speech decrying racism on the 100th
anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, and has sought to portray racial
justice as a top priority for his administration.
The
president's son joked in a January 2019 text to corporate attorney
George Mesires about a 'big penis', and said to the lawyer: 'I only love
you because you're black' and 'true dat n***a'
wired |The repercussions of
Gebru’s termination quickly radiated out from her team to the rest of
Google and, beyond that, to the entire discipline of AI fairness
research.
Some Google employees, including David
Baker, a director who’d been at the company for 16 years, publicly quit
over its treatment of Gebru. Google’s research department was riven by
mistrust and rumors about what happened and what might happen next. Even
people who believed Gebru had behaved in ways unbecoming of a corporate
researcher saw Google’s response as ham-handed. Some researchers feared
their work would now be policed more closely. One of them, Nicholas
Carlini, sent a long internal email complaining of changes that company
lawyers made to another paper involving large language models, published
after Gebru was fired, likening the intervention to “Big Brother
stepping in.” The changes downplayed the problems the paper reported and
removed references to Google’s own technology, the email said.
Soon
after, Google rolled out its response to the roiling scandal and
sketched out a more locked-down future for in-house research probing
AI’s power. Marian Croak, the executive who had shown interest in
Gebru’s work, was given the task of consolidating the various teams
working on what the company called responsible AI, including Mitchell
and Gebru’s. Dean sent around an email announcing that a review of
Gebru’s ouster had concluded; he was sorry, he said, that the company
had not “handled this situation with more sensitivity.”
Dean
also announced that progress on improving workforce diversity would now
be considered in top executives’ performance reviews—perhaps quietly
conceding Gebru’s assertion that leaders were not held accountable for
their poor showing on this count. And he informed researchers that they
would be given firmer guidance on “Google’s research goals and
priorities.” A Google source later explained that this meant future
projects touching on sensitive or commercial topics would require more
input from in-house legal experts, product teams, and others within
Google who had relevant expertise. The outlook for open-minded,
independent research on ethical AI appeared gloomy. Google claimed that
it still had hundreds of people working on responsible AI, and that it
would expand those teams; the company painted Gebru and Mitchell’s group
as a tiny and relatively unimportant cog in a big machine. But others
at Google said the Ethical AI leaders and their frank feedback would be
missed. “For me, it’s the most critical voices that are the most
important and where I have learned the most,” says one person who worked
on product changes with Gebru and Mitchell’s input. Bengio, the women’s
manager, turned his back on 14 years of working on AI at Google and
quit to join Apple.
Outside of Google, nine
Democrats in Congress wrote to Pichai questioning his commitment to
preventing AI’s harms. Mitchell had at one point tried to save the
“Stochastic Parrots” paper by telling executives that publishing it
would bolster arguments that the company was capable of self-policing.
Quashing it was now undermining those arguments.
Some
academics announced that they had backed away from company events or
funding. The fairness and technology conference’s organizers stripped
Google of its status as a sponsor of the event. Luke Stark, who studies
the social impacts of AI at the University of Western Ontario, turned
down a $60,000 grant from Google in protest of its treatment of the
Ethical AI team. When he applied for the money in December 2020, he had
considered the team a “strong example” of how corporate researchers
could do powerful work. Now he wanted nothing to do with Google.
Tensions built into the field of AI ethics, he saw, were beginning to
cause fractures.
“The big tech companies tried to
steal a march on regulators and public criticism by embracing the idea
of AI ethics,” Stark says. But as the research matured, it raised bigger
questions. “Companies became less able to coexist with internal
critical research,” he says. One person who runs an ethical AI team at
another tech company agrees. “Google and most places did not count on
the field becoming what it did.”
To some, the
drama at Google suggested that researchers on corporate payrolls should
be subject to different rules than those from institutions not seeking
to profit from AI. In April, some founding editors of a new journal of
AI ethics published a paper calling for industry researchers to disclose
who vetted their work and how, and for whistle-blowing mechanisms to be
set up inside corporate labs. “We had been trying to poke on this issue
already, but when Timnit got fired it catapulted into a more mainstream
conversation,” says Savannah Thais, a researcher at Princeton on the
journal’s board who contributed to the paper. “Now a lot more people are
questioning: Is it possible to do good ethics research in a corporate
AI setting?”
If that mindset takes hold, in-house
ethical AI research may forever be held in suspicion—much the way
industrial research on pollution is viewed by environmental scientists.
Jeff Dean admitted in a May interview with CNET that the company had
suffered a real “reputational hit” among people interested in AI ethics
work. The rest of the interview dealt mainly with promoting Google’s
annual developer conference, where it was soon announced that large
language models, the subject of Gebru’s fateful critique, would play a
more central role in Google search and the company’s voice assistant.
Meredith Whittaker, faculty director of New York University’s AI Now
Institute, predicts that there will be a clearer split between work done
at institutions like her own and work done inside tech companies. “What
Google just said to anyone who wants to do this critical research is,
‘We’re not going to tolerate it,’” she says. (Whittaker herself once
worked at Google, where she clashed with management over AI ethics and
the Maven Pentagon contract before leaving in 2019.)
Any
such divide is unlikely to be neat, given how the field of AI ethics
sprouted in a tech industry hothouse. The community is still small, and
jobs outside big companies are sparser and much less well paid,
particularly for candidates without computer science PhDs. That’s in
part because AI ethics straddles the established boundaries of academic
departments. Government and philanthropic funding is no match for
corporate purses, and few institutions can rustle up the data and
computing power needed to match work from companies like Google.
For
Gebru and her fellow travelers, the past five years have been
vertiginous. For a time, the period seemed revolutionary: Tech companies
were proactively exploring flaws in AI, their latest moneymaking
marvel—a sharp contrast to how they’d faced up to problems like spam and
social network moderation only after coming under external pressure.
But now it appeared that not much had changed after all, even if many
individuals had good intentions.
Inioluwa Deborah
Raji, whom Gebru escorted to Black in AI in 2017, and who now works as a
fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, says that Google’s treatment of its
own researchers demands a permanent shift in perceptions. “There was
this hope that some level of self-regulation could have happened at
these tech companies,” Raji says. “Everyone’s now aware that the true
accountability needs to come from the outside—if you’re on the inside,
there’s a limit to how much you can protect people.”
Gebru,
who recently returned home after her unexpectedly eventful road trip,
has come to a similar conclusion. She’s raising money to launch an
independent research institute modeled on her work on Google’s Ethical
AI team and her experience in Black in AI. “We need more support for
external work so that the choice is not ‘Do I get paid by the DOD or by
Google?’” she says.
Gebru has had offers, but she
can’t imagine working within the industry anytime in the near future.
She’s been thinking back to conversations she’d had with a friend who
warned her not to join Google, saying it was harmful to women and
impossible to change. Gebru had disagreed, claiming she could nudge
things, just a little, toward a more beneficial path. “I kept on arguing
with her,” Gebru says. Now, she says, she concedes the point.
Guardian |Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research
professor of communication and science and technology studies at the
University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.
You’ve written a book critical of AI but you work for a company that is among the leaders in its deployment. How do you square that circle? I
work in the research wing of Microsoft, which is a distinct
organisation, separate from product development. Unusually, over its
30-year history, it has hired social scientists to look critically at
how technologies are being built. Being on the inside, we are often able
to see downsides early before systems are widely deployed. My book did
not go through any pre-publication review – Microsoft Research does not
require that – and my lab leaders support asking hard questions, even if
the answers involve a critical assessment of current technological
practices.
What’s the aim of the book? We
are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and
immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its
natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory
logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to
see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon
fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers
of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by
showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of
production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate
account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the
conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of
sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.
What should people know about how AI products are made? We
aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the
environmental costs. But saying, “Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet
rolls,” invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all
around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green
technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the
curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd
work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon
boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural
resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the
systems appear autonomous.
Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that? Bias
is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we’re talking about.
Time and again, we see these systems producing errors – women offered
less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled –
and the response has been: “We just need more data.” But I’ve tried to
look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms
of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they
are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for
machine learning software thatcasually categorise
people into just one of two genders; that label people according to
their skin colour into one of five racial categories, and which attempt,
based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The
idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a
dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become
baked into the substrates of AI.
WSJ | A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins.
The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that
represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six
different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used
in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for
which word it likes to use most.
In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other
sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a
CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make
two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by
splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double
arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through
recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely
to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can
recombine with CoV-2.
In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes
CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That
means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called
recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a
sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other
virus.
Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite
is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the
double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and
scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional
advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible
choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to
track the insertion in the laboratory.
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears
in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel
coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least
favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice
the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do
you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with
all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination
used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin
of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.
When the lab’s
Shi Zhengli
and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s
partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that
supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the
fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper.
Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of
the gain-of-function origin?
politico | At the
heart of the current broadside against Fauci is reporting around — and
the investigation into — the Wuhan lab leak theory, which holds that the
virus leaked, accidentally or intentionally, from a virology lab in the
city where it was first found. Republicans and right-wing media outlets
have circulated such theories since the beginning of the pandemic even
as scientists, including Fauci, insisted that problematic coronaviruses,
from the SARS and MERS epidemics to Covid-19, were becoming
increasingly common.
The
pressure to probe Wuhan lab leak theories continued to mount, leading
Trump’s White House to demand in April 2020 that the National Institutes
of Health abruptly cancel
a multimillion-dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit studying
coronavirus origins that had worked with the Wuhan viral lab in the
past. April emails between EcoHealth Alliance CEO Peter Daszak and
Fauci, published as part of the recent FOIA, have become a new
touchstone for conspiracy theorists, after Daszak thanked the NIAID
director for dismissing lab leak theories early in the pandemic.
“I
just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and
collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific
evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human
spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,”
Daszak wrote to Fauci on April 18, 2020.
“Many
thanks for your kind note,” Fauci responded the next day, just over a
week before POLITICO first reported that NIH canceled the EcoHealth
grant. Daszak did not respond to a POLITICO request for comment.
Theories
about a leak from the Wuhan virology lab became a consistent line of
questioning for Republican lawmakers by last spring and soon turned into
a mainstay of congressional hearings and increasingly contentious
exchanges between Fauci and Paul, who sits on the Senate health
committee. The longtime NIAID director and Kentucky doctor have
exchanged barbs on television after Senate hearings where Paul accused
Fauci of moving the goalposts on coronavirus science while the
infectious disease scientist has told Paul that “with all due respect,”
he was “entirely and completely incorrect.”
Paul was swift to accuse Fauci on
Wednesday of knowledge of the Wuhan lab allegedly carrying out
controversial “gain-of-function” studies, a field of research that
alters viruses in a way that can make them more transmissible or help
them hop to new hosts, such as humans.
A senior NIH official insisted to
POLITICO that detractors such as Paul are taking Fauci’s emails “out of
context.” But the prevailing posture, like that of the White House, was
to downplay rather than engage.
“The FOIA articles are discussed like
any other issues and then we move on,” the official said. “We're taking
it seriously, of course, but it's not changing how we do business or our
focus.”
foxnews | "It was fascinating to watch and track the reaction of the
establishment to Donald Trump. He became a figurehead for this populist
push back against global capitalist ideology," said Hopkins.
This
"global capitalist ideology" he described, or "GloboCap" as he’s taken
to calling it in his writings, is an ideologically monolithic
global-capitalist societal structure. Essentially, a ruling class made
up of globalist oligarchs.
"It was just so clear they set out to
destroy him, make an example of him, and demonize everybody who put him
in office," said Hopkins.
He claimed the demonization of Trump
during his four years in office was this ruling class "reminding us
who's in charge and what happens if we elect unauthorized presidents who
haven't been approved by the system."
Admittedly not a fan of Trump, Hopkins couldn’t help but laugh at all of
the ways in which the former president was vilified. "First, he was a
Russian intelligence asset, then he was literally Hitler and was going
to overthrow the U.S. government with some underground White supremacist
militia," Hopkins recalled, claiming the accusations were "pure fantasy
that was taken seriously."
According to Hopkins, this push toward a post-COVID "New Normal"
society in which people are willing to lockdown in their homes when
told, wear masks when asked, and carry around their COVID-19 vaccination
cards in order to be allowed into public spaces is a continuation of
the invisible ruling class asserting its dominance.
"One thing
that I've been saying to try to get through to people," said Hopkins,
"is just the whole idea of lockdowns. ‘Lockdown,’ this is a prison term,
right? And when do you lock down the prison? When the prisoners are
rioting and getting rebellious. It's a way of reminding everyone, 'Hey,
you're in prison and we're in charge.'"
"It isn't really about the
vaccines or the tests," he said in regards to newly implemented
guidelines. "What it's about is training us, conditioning us to live in a
society where we accept this type of control."
Another aspect of
this "synchronization of culture," as Hopkins called it, and which he
finds particularly terrifying is the ideological uniformity being spread
by "big supranational entities and corporate media" on behalf of the
establishment.
"It's tearing societies apart, it's tearing
relationships apart, it's tearing families apart, this extreme
polarization and intolerance of dissent and differing views," he said.
"I feel like if I start questioning or challenging the official COVID
narrative, if I start pointing out facts, I'm treated like a suppressive
person in the Church of Scientology."
mises | Recently, Joe Rogan, one of the largest podcast hosts in the United
States (10.6 million YouTube subscribers), expressed the following opinion about the vaccination of young adults:
If you are 21 and ask me if you should get the vaccine, I
would say "no". If you are a healthy person and exercise all the time,
and are young and eat well, I don't think you have to worry about this.
Spotify’s Joe Rogan encourages "healthy" young people not to get a coronavirus vaccine. His show is Spotify's most popular podcast.
“If you're like 21 years old, and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I'll go no.” pic.twitter.com/5dX98xUaHS
This comment created a furor in the United States, where the
government's target is vaccination of the entire adult population. For
these few sentences he received a sharp reprimand from the White House
and Dr. Fauci, who accused Rogan of being selfish and endangering
vulnerable members of society.
“You can get infected, and will get infected, if you put yourself at risk.” -Dr. Anthony Fauci responding to podcast host Joe Rogan’s suggestion that young people not get the COVID-19 vaccine pic.twitter.com/6E02GI31VV
In reality, the real question is not whether Joe Rogan was right or
wrong in saying what he said. Criticism of a citizen by the US
government is disturbing regardless of the comments that were made. What
about freedom of speech when the state criticizes an individual's
speech?
The protection of freedom of speech and of the press in the USA is
among the strongest that exists. The First Amendment to the Constitution
in theory offers extremely robust protection with its famous words:
"Congress will not make any law curtailing freedom of speech, or of the
press."
But this implies that it is not unconstitutional for the authorities
to publicly judge the speech of its citizens, such as Rogan. As reported
by Glenn Greenwald, this represents in practice a government control of
speech. He quotes a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner who notes that:
Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying.
For politically "sensitive" subjects, authorities do not accept
deviations from their official story. This deleterious situation has
existed since long before the pandemic. Today, it is about vaccine
policy, but yesterday, about the war on terrorism, about Russiagate, about the corruption of Joe Biden, and many other topics.
Nymag | As
we sift through the lab-leak debacle, the good news is that the healthy
antibodies in the system are still strong enough to overcome the
groupthink that produced the original error. News media are
investigating a hypothesis they once dismissed, and the government has
announced an investigation to find the truth.
The
bad news is that the problem is turning out to be worse than it
initially seemed — and worse still, the source of the failure is not
going away. The implications of this episode are much broader than
understanding the source of the pandemic. It is a question about whether
institutions like the media and government can withstand the pressure
of ideological conformity.
A recent Washington Post
story, looking back at the government’s response to virus’s
origination, reported that many officials refused to explore the
lab-leak hypothesis because it was associated with right-wing politics.
“For some of the officials who were privately suspicious of the Wuhan
lab, Trump’s and Navarro’s comments turned the lab-leak scenario into a
fringe conspiracy theory,” the Post found, “It became nearly
impossible to generate interest among health experts in a hypothesis
that Trump had turned into a political weapon, they said.”
That
is an extraordinarily damning admission. Health experts who understood
all along that it was entirely possible that the virus emerged from a
lab simply refused to examine the hypothesis because it had become
associated with the likes of Donald Trump.
Openness to evidence is the historical strength of American liberalism.
This is why, for all the errors liberals have committed since the
Progressive Era, a capacity for self-correction has given continued
vitality to their — our — creed. The lab-leak fiasco ought to be a
warning sign of what happens if the urge to not be defeated or
manipulated by the right turns into an emulation of its methods. The
only thing worse than having a hack gap would be not having one.
FT | “There are a lot of questions that must be answered by Dr Fauci,” said Donald Trump, the former president whom Fauci served as an adviser, following the release of the emails. Trump’s supporters, many of whom accuse Fauci of having exaggerated the severity of the pandemic, have gone further. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, on Friday urged Fauci to resign.
Fauci himself admits to being worried. Not about the blowback, however, but about what it says about America. “It worries me about what it says about this country,” he told the Financial Times.
“The emails show someone who is always assessing the data as they evolve. But people are selectively pulling emails out to distort what the reality is.”
The 80-year-old Fauci is one of America’s best-known and most well-respected doctors.
Having advised every president since Ronald Reagan, he achieved renown in the scientific world for his work on HIV in the 1980s when he was one of the first public medics to sound the alarm about a strange new disease identified among gay men. He won the respect of gay activists after helping to change the way medical trials were run so that more people could get access to potentially life-saving treatments.
“Tony revolutionised how clinical trials are done for HIV,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a longtime friend of Fauci.
“He is a great medic, but he is also a natural leader, and knows how to get things done.”
Fauci played a prominent role in the American responses to Sars, Mers and the Ebola outbreak of 2014-16, when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came under fire over its response.
“There was a time when CDC was being attacked unfairly,” said Tom Frieden, who was CDC director at the time. “Many people in that situation would have stood by or even quietly piled on, but Tony did exactly the opposite. He stood up for us internally and he stood up for us, publicly. He is a mensch.”
Fauci has been one of the most prominent faces of the US Covid response. He has become famous for frequent television appearances in which he discusses in plain terms and in his broad New York accent the seriousness of the pandemic.
newsweek | The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an
irreparable blow to the credibility of America's ruling class and the
ruling class's implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly
trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than
Dr. Anthony Fauci,
who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation's
leading immunologist and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy
response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History,
Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic,
waffling on what the "science" demands at any given moment while still
always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.
Recent Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, requests by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post only underscore the point. Perhaps most damningly, the FOIA requests revealed
a February 2020 email to former Obama-era Secretary of Health and Human
Services Sylvia Burwell explaining that store-bought face masks are
"really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to
people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people
from acquiring infection." He also added that the "typical mask you buy
in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is
small enough to pass through material."
Of course, barely over a month after Fauci's unearthed email to
Burwell, Americans were required to wear masks pretty much every time
they left their house—and mask-skeptical posts were censored or deleted
by the ruling class's preferred private-sector enforcement arm, Big Tech. And none of this is to even broach the separate issue of the extensive COVID-19-era societal lockdowns, which were never justified
on the scientific metrics despite being ubiquitously promoted by those
excoriating lockdown-skeptical conservatives to just shut up and "trust
the science."
In addition to the Fauci FOIA cache, there is also the Democratic Party
and the media's inexplicable 180-degree turn on the plausibility of the
Wuhan lab leak theory—that is, the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic has
as its origins not a zoonotic transmission at a local "wet market" but
an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting
dangerous coronavirus research (partially subsidized by the U.S.
taxpayer) and happens to be located within the immediate vicinity of the
then-novel virus' first confirmed cases. The lab leak theory was always plausible,
if not probable, but those who promoted it as a possibility from the
onset—such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and then-President Donald Trump—were routinely lambasted as Sinophobic conspiracy theorists.
vanityfair | Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that
causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the
world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how
or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population.
Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without
knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right
steps to prevent a recurrence.
And yet, in the wake of the Lancet
statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which
contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one
possible answer to this all-important question remained largely
off-limits until the spring of 2021.
Behind closed
doors, however, national security and public health experts and
officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were
locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be
investigated and made public.
A months long Vanity Fair
investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of
hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal
memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts
of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting
controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into
COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting,
officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say
they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan
Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would
bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair,
Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State
Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote
that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International
Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not
to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would
“‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”
There
are reasons to doubt the lab-leak hypothesis. There is a long,
well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to outbreaks, even
when the initial and intermediate host animals have remained a mystery
for months and years, and some expert virologists say the supposed
oddities of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence have been found in nature.
But for most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario
was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally
out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control
director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists
after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I
was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,”
Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
With
President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his
xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the
outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s
most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most
aggressive research?
CJR | What changed? There’s still no direct evidence to validate the lab-leak theory. There has been fresh contextual reporting: the Journalrecently revealed
the existence of a US intelligence document claiming that three
researchers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019. (The
Trump administration previously issued a fuzzier version of this claim;
the Journal’s sources disagreed as to the strength of the intelligence.) Eighteen scientists wrote in Science
that an investigation conducted by the World Health Organization and
China failed to give “balanced consideration” to the natural-origin and
lab-leak hypotheses. Nicholas Wade, a former Times science journalist, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
that, as things stand, “proponents of lab escape can explain all the
available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who
favor natural emergence,” and Donald G. McNeil, Jr., another former Times reporter (who recently left the paper following an allegation of racism), wrote on Medium essentially backing Wade up. Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that he’s not as confident as he was in the natural-origin theory. President Biden revealed
that the intelligence community is split on the question, and ordered a
further investigation to report back within ninety days.
Others say that, actually, nothing has really changed—a
position that seems to unite observers who think the lab-leak theory
was always credible and those who continue to doubt it. “The theory has
always been the same,” Josh Rogin, a Post columnist who reported over a year ago on US safety concerns around the Wuhan lab, tweeted. “The people who got it wrong changed their minds.” Striking a different note, Angela Rasmussen, a prominent virologist, argued
that “the media has chosen to dress up old speculation as new
information and claim that it’s evidence. It’s not. It’s speculative,
and all origin hypotheses remain possible.”
There is an awful lot to unpack here. The nub of the media criticism is, in my view, justified. Last April, I wrote,
responding to Rogin’s reporting, that the press should “isolate
legitimate questions” from conspiratorial noise “and try and report out
the answers”; numerous journalists took this approach to the lab-leak
theory, but many others did indeed dismiss it as an illegitimate line of
inquiry. Such stories channeled familiar broader problems with pandemic
coverage—principally, the contriving of scientific certainty in the
absence of expert consensus, exacerbated by the urgent political stakes
of all the conspiratorial noise. We are now seeing scientists argue in
good faith about what the evidence shows—indeed, what the evidence is. This was always desirable; too often, however, argument itself was tarred as a bad-faith act.
Forbes | During an interview with CNN Thursday, Fauci was asked about an
exchange he had with a British disease expert who worked with the lab in
question—the Wuhan Institute of Virology—in April 2020.
The email exchange was made public after the Washington Postand Buzzfeed News obtained Fauci’s messages through a FOIA request and published a trove of them this week.
In the exchange, Fauci thanks the zoologist and head of the controversial virus research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, for commending him for publicly dismissing the lab-leak theory.
Fauci on Thursday called it “nonsense” that Republicans have
latched on to the emails, claiming he was not saying anything then that
he would not say now.
“I have always said . . . that I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human,” Fauci maintained.
Fauci said he was going to keep an “open mind” about the
possibility of a lab leak, but still believed animal-to-human
transmission was most likely.
Crucial Quote
“From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your
trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’
origins,” Daszak wrote in April 2020, according to emails published by Buzzfeed. “Many thanks for your kind note,” Fauci responds.
Key Background
Fauci has been accused of shifting his stance on the possibility of a
lab leak. Most scientists continue to believe the virus began in the
wild, where it was transmitted to a human, but many health experts,
including Fauci, are now forcefully calling for a more rigorous
investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last month, a
group of 18 prominent scientists published a letter in Science referring to both the lab-leak theory and the zoonotic spillover as “viable” until they collect sufficient data, while the Wall Street Journal reported
details of a U.S. intelligence report that found several researchers
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with Covid-like
symptoms in November 2019, weeks before the disease was first
identified. The WHO’s initial investigation
into the origins of the pandemic found it “extremely unlikely” that the
virus escaped from a lab, but the origins of the virus are yet to be
concluded.
What To Watch For
Last week, President Joe Biden announced
intelligence agencies have “coalesced around two likely scenarios” for
the origin of Covid-19, including the lab-leak theory and
wildlife-to-human spread, and called on officials to “redouble their
efforts” to come to a conclusion on the virus’ origin over the next 90
days.
Chief Critic
Republicans have criticized Fauci over his link to Daszak and EcoHealth. The National Institute of Health previously provided funding to EcoHealth for pandemic research, which worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grant to EcoHealth was canceled last year by the Trump Administration. “The truth is out,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) wrote
on Twitter Wednesday. “Fauci’s emails show he suspected early last year
that Covid-19 possibly leaked from the Wuhan lab—yet he stayed silent.
This is a major cover-up. We need a full congressional investigation
into the origins of Covid-19.”
dailymail | A forthcoming book about Dr. Anthony Fauci has been removed from Amazon and Barnes & Noble after it was accidentally posted for pre-sale prematurely.
The
80-page tome, titled 'Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth,
Service, and the Way Forward', is set to be released by National
Geographic Books on November 2.
On Tuesday, the hardcover book went up for pre-sale online for the sum of $18, before the listing pages mysteriously vanished.
On Wednesday, JustTheNews reported
that the book 'had been scrubbed from online listings... amid criticism
that Fauci is profiting from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic'.
However, National Geographic Books told DailyMail.com that there was a more innocent explanation for the removal.
'The book was prematurely posted for pre-sale, which is why it was taken down,' the company said in a statement.
They
added: 'The book was developed by National Geographic Books in
connection with an upcoming National Geographic Documentary Film about
Dr. Fauci. He will not earn any royalties from its publication.'
Fauci's forthcoming book will be compiled
of interviews that he has conducted during his 34-year stint as the
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
An
overview of the book states: 'Before becoming the face of the White
House Coronavirus Task Force and America's most trusted doctor, Dr.
Fauci had already devoted three decades to public service.
'Those
looking to live a more compassionate and purposeful life will find
inspiration in his unique perspective on leadership, expecting the
unexpected, and finding joy in difficult times.'
The
overview further states: 'The earnest reflections in these pages will
offer a universal message on how to lead in times of crisis and find
resilience in the face of disappointments and obstacles'.
ivmmeta |•97% of
37 early treatment and prophylaxis studies
report positive effects (95% of all
57 studies). 26
studies show statistically significant improvements in isolation.
•Random effects meta-analysis with
pooled effects using the most serious outcome reported shows 78% and
85% improvement for
early
treatment and prophylaxis(RR
0.22
[0.12-0.39] and
0.15
[0.09-0.25]). Results are similar after exclusion based sensitivity analysis:
80% and
87% (RR
0.20
[0.14-0.28] and
0.13
[0.07-0.25]),
and after restriction to 32 peer-reviewed studies:
80% and
88% (RR
0.20
[0.12-0.34] and
0.12
[0.05-0.30]).
•81% and
96% lower mortality is observed for early treatment and prophylaxis
(RR 0.19
[0.07-0.54] and
0.04
[0.00-0.58]). Statistically
significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, hospitalization,
cases, and viral clearance.
•100% of the
17 Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for early treatment and prophylaxis report positive effects,
with an estimated improvement of
73% and
83% respectively (RR 0.27
[0.18-0.41] and
0.17
[0.05-0.61]), and 93% of all
29 RCTs.
•The probability that an ineffective
treatment generated results as positive as the
57 studies to date is estimated to be 1 in
5 trillion (p = 0.00000000000021).
•Heterogeneity arises from many factors including
treatment delay, patient population, the effect measured, variants, and
treatment regimens. The consistency of positive results across a wide variety
of cases is remarkable. Heterogeneity is low in specific cases, for example
early treatment mortality.
•While many treatments have some level
of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid
infection. Only 28% of ivermectin
studies show zero events in the treatment arm.
•Elimination of COVID-19 is a race
against viral evolution. No treatment, vaccine, or intervention is 100%
available and effective for all current and future variants. All practical,
effective, and safe means should be used. Not doing so increases the risk of
COVID-19 becoming endemic; and increases mortality, morbidity, and collateral
damage.
•Many studies do not specify
administration, or specify fasting. Administration with food may significantly
increase plasma and tissue concentration.
•All data to reproduce this paper and
the sources are in the appendix.
See [Bryant, Hill, Kory, Lawrie, Nardelli] for other meta analyses, all
with similar results confirming effectiveness.
One of the disconcerting things I’ve been seeing again and
again from all the major players in this new narrative like Lue
Elizondo and Christopher Mellon is the absurd assertion that not only is
it entirely possible that the unknown phenomena allegedly being
regularly witnessed by military personnel are extraterrestrial in
origin, but that if they are extraterrestrial they may want to hurt us.
Mellon,
the former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
who helped get the ball rolling on UFOs entering mainstream attention
back in 2017 when he leaked three Pentagon videos to The New York Times, has stated that he sees extraterrestrial origin as an entirely possible explanation for these phenomena.
“We don’t even understand how you could do something like that,” Mellon said in a recent interview with CTV News
of the inexplicable maneuvers and features these aircraft supposedly
demonstrate. “We don’t even understand the science behind it. Not like
somebody’s a couple generations of fighter jet behind us; I mean this is
a whole difference of kind, not degree.”
Asked
why the pilots of mysterious aircraft with incomprehensible scientific
advancement might want to monitor the US military, Mellon said the
following:
“Well
probably for the same reason we do: to understand what kind of threat
we could pose to them. Should a conflict arise they want to be able to
engage us effectively, defeat us rapidly, at minimum cost of life and
treasure, just as we would on the other side. We do similar kinds of
things; we don’t have vehicles quite like this, but we’re certainly very
actively monitoring military forces of other countries.”
The
notion that UFOs could pose a threat to humans whether their alleged
operators are from our own world or from another is being promoted by
the main drivers of this strange new plotline, and it is being
enthusiastically lapped up by many UFO enthusiasts who see framing these
phenomena as a national security threat as the best way to get
mainstream power structures to take them seriously and disclose
information to the public.
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